The Boy at the Fossil Table

High on the back of a sleeping stone whale, a floating museum drifted through the clouds. It was called the Hall of Curious Bones, and Daniel loved it more than anything. He was an apprentice there, which meant he got to dust ribs the size of canoes and label tiny finger bones no bigger than raisins.

He also had a list. Daniel always had a list. Tucked in his hoodie pocket, folded four times, it said things like: try the volcano-pepper sauce, build a ramp on the west stairwell, name every bone in the foot (there are twenty-six).

At the bottom, in smaller writing, it said: say hi to the boy at the fossil table. That one had been on the list for three whole weeks.

The boy's name was Orin. He always ate his lunch alone at the far end of the sorting table, chewing slowly, sketching in a little notebook. He had joined the Hall in the middle of winter, when the sky-ferries were still frozen, and he did not talk much to anybody.

Every day at noon, Daniel thought, today. Every day at one, he thought, tomorrow, definitely. He would step forward and then remember he had to alphabetize the jawbones, or count the toe joints, or look very seriously at a rock.

"You could just go," Daniel muttered to himself, chewing the inside of his cheek. "You volunteer for everything. This is just walking."

But walking, it turned out, was the hard part.

On Monday, Daniel did the bravest thing he had ever done, which was carry his lunch tin fourteen steps in a straight line.

He sat down across from Orin. He put his tin on the table. He opened it. Inside was a cheese sandwich and a small jar of hot sauce, because Daniel put hot sauce on everything, even things that did not want it.

Orin looked up. Orin looked back down. Daniel nodded like this was a completely normal thing that was going fine.

They did not say a single word for ten whole minutes.

Daniel counted the seconds by tapping his thumb against his knee, the way he did when his hearing aid whistled and he was pretending it wasn't. Ten minutes is a very long time when nobody is talking. Ten minutes is about six hundred taps.

Then something happened. A curator wheeled past pushing a cart of new arrivals, and one of them slid off — a fat, dog-eared book that landed between them with a whump.

Daniel and Orin both reached for it. Their hands stopped a hair apart above the cover.

It was the bone book. Not just any bone book — the bone book. The one with the sketch of a griffin's wing-hand on the front and the smell of old library. Daniel had read it eleven times. His copy at home had a jam stain on page forty.

"I love this book," Daniel said, at the exact same moment Orin said, "This is my favorite book."

They both froze. Then Orin's mouth did something small at one corner. It was almost a smile. It was the beginning of one.

After that, the words came out sideways and all at once. Orin knew the name of every bone in a dragon's tail. Daniel knew every bone in a human foot, and threw in the ankle for free. They argued kindly about whether the wishbone in a phoenix was actually one bone or two fused together, and whether the little floating bone in a whale's ear was called a tympanic bulla or something ruder.

Then Orin slid a drawing across the table. It was a bone he had found in the drawer marked UNSORTED. Long, curved, thin as a reed, with a strange little hook at one end.

"Nobody knows what it is," he said.

Daniel felt his whole brain lean forward.

"I bet we could find out," he said. "Together, I mean. If you want."

They spent the rest of lunch flipping through the bone book, pointing and gasping and going, "No, wait, look —" until at last they landed on a page near the back. There it was. The same hook. The same reed-thin curve. It belonged to a sky-otter, a small clever creature that lived on the underside of clouds and was thought to be entirely made up until about eleven years ago.

Orin sat back. His eyes were shining.

"We solved it," he said, very quietly, as if saying it loud might scare it off.

"We did," Daniel said. Then, because his mouth was faster than the rest of him, and because his list had a lot of empty room left, he added, "Do you want to come over on Saturday? My grandma makes these dumplings that could rewire your face. And I have that book at home. The jam-stain one."

Orin thought about it for exactly one second.

"Yes," he said.

And across the table, in the middle of a hall full of bones from a hundred impossible animals, two apprentices sat with their heads bent over the same open page, and neither of them was eating lunch alone anymore.